


Grey

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Grief/Mourning, Lestrade-centric, M/M, Still King Arthur to Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-09 00:30:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On his first day back to work, Greg takes the hat with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grey

On his first day back to work, Greg takes the hat with him.   
  
There is a coat hook inside his office door, where he used to hang his coat every day but one. An early morning rite, just him and the clear gelid dawn filling the room, seconds before the day moved into its warm hurly-burly of voices and knocks, and the terracotta whiff of hot coffee, merging with the first bleat of his phone.  
  
Back in the days when his job was a labour of love.  
  
' _Believe me, Lestrade. If it were my call, all you'd be consulting from now on would be the Highway Code on a Hounslow roundabout. You fucking amateur. Sadly, it seems that the powers in command want to play softly-softly in your case.'_  
  
' _Sir –'_  
  
_'Shut up. Just – shut up. We're holding one, and I mean_ one _, press conf over this whole shit, and you're out of it. You will not talk of that man, not here, not outside of here, he's done with, blotted out, PNG, finished and praise the Lord for clean riddance. If I hear you've so much as mentioned his name, you'll find yourself wishing it was Hounslow. Do I make myself clear?'_  
  
' _...'_  
  
_'You'll need to work on that look, too. You better be a hard worker, Lestrade. We've redeployed your team, but Gregson could do with a hand, man still thinks "report" is a posh name for bang-bang. Off with you, and remember to keep your gob shut.'_  
  
On his second day, he hangs the hat onto the window stay. The high window faces the office door across his desk, so high means that the latch comes at eye-level for any random visitor. Sometimes, Lestrade raises his head from the lumpy sea of papers and gazes back at the hat in the gathering summer light.   
  
Sometimes, he holds out his hand and touches his fingertips to it.

* * *

  
  
Sally's idea, it had been.   
  
Raising a wince and a groan, in hindsight, how proud he'd been of his team. How certain that they'd made it, they'd mended the small gashes left by Sherlock's less than suave ego over the stretch of years. Not that he'd ever held hope of seeing the guys play Happy Families with Sherlock. A believer, he, not a sodding mystic.   
  
But one of them had said  _hats off to the freak_  with a benign chuckle, in the crest of success, and Sally had chimed in at once,  _speaking of hats..._  - and the next thing he knew, Lestrade was walking her down the aisle in Harrods. Blessing Peter Ricoletti for letting himself be caught in the midpoint of sales.  
  
The hat had been Sally's idea, but the choice was his. Sherlock must have known as soon as he'd ripped off the silverish paper, because he'd teased Greg mercilessly on their way out of the conference room.  
  
' _Grey. Now why would you chose a grey one, I wonder?'_  
  
' _Yeah, well, our first choice was orange. With a flashing light and siren preferably, so the guys can be warned  —'_  
  
_'Oooh. Oh, but I see it now. A memory jogger, in case I happened to delete your name again. Really, Greg. Such a sad lack of confidence.'_  
  
_'You wish. Nah, take it as the resident greyhead's compliment. To your little grey cells. Though Sal says you'll be bringing galoshes back next...'_  
  
He’d seen the hat again, that night at 221B, while he was reading Sherlock Holmes his rights. The hat sat on the skull with a rakish tilt sideways, its topknot gleaming under the pale domestic neons. (Trust Sherlock to avoid rosy lampshades at all costs.) Greg had spared it a glance and forgotten it it in the heated blast of craziness that had followed. Until it came back to him, the words, the voice. Merciless.   
  
_Sad lack of confidence, Inspector._  
  
Now there is no one to tell that he did, in fact, trust well before the eleventh hour, as soon as Sherlock's finger touched his brow. And thus, the hat. The hat which is grey and empty, but will bloody well heed Sherlock's words and serve as a memento. Here, where it can double as a denial.

A vote of protest.

A penance.  
  
Lestrade turns his head and smiles at the hat. 'The great Sherlock Holmes - got it spot on, didn't you? Except for the name. It's not about me, this. It never was, but it's all right. Because I'm gonna see to it that you get your name back,  _mon gosse_ , if that's the last thing I do. Now shut up and let me think.'

 

* * *

  
The months go by. The hat remains.  
  
Lestrade finds that his is a slow task. While Richard Brook quickly proves to have been as elusive as his alias, the inquest on Sherlock's death (echoed back to him in discreet hums and haws along the Met corridors) dissolves just as quickly. As case after case fails to indict the dead man, Lestrade waits for a statement that never comes. His superiors, it appears, have an omertà of their own. And so Lestrade scavenges anything he can, and builds his own case on the sideline, in that grey zone where no lie can survive long, but it takes truth forever and ever to reach the sound barrier.  
  
Meanwhile, the press have a cream tea over "Bluffin' Sherlock", smack their lips contentedly, and move on to the next fleshpots.  
  
But as the first winter becomes entangled with the second year and John Watson sends news of his impending marriage, Lestrade begins to feel a change in the air.  
  
It starts with Stanley Hopkins signing all of his reports twice over with his initials, a perfectly redundant device and a first as far as Lestrade can remember. Since Hopkins doubles as their liaison officer with Human Resources _and_ the Met's Sports Club, this results in "SH" erupting all over their floor.  
  
Greg grins quietly, remembering Stanley's high-pitched gasp the first time he'd entered his office after Lestrade’s fall from grace. But Hopkins is one of the rare officers Sherlock used to credit with a penny'orth of brains, and Lestrade is not surprised at this ingenious tip of the hat - or to the hat.  
  
And then, out of the blue, the tips are everywhere. Someone hacks into the Met's central computer system and for the next twenty-four hours, a well-known scowl in a garish blanket graces every screen in the building. Graffiti of "Wrong!", "CS, Go Holmes" and a few racier variants are quick to follow. Greg finds out that the coffee vending machine in their break room answers to a name, and, for the first time in two years, stops Sally Donovan on her way out.  
  
'The Freak, eh? Nice move, Sergeant.'  
  
Sally is looking down at her natty black shoes, but she does answer him. Plucky girl, Sally Donovan.

'Had to do my bit, right? I mean, you know how it is. Makes you wait ten bloody minutes, or pockets the change, or pours so fast the cup topples and you feel like whacking the thing into next Tuesday. And the juice is searing hot, and never sugar-friendly. _But it always delivers_. Always.'  
  
'Donovan.'  
  
She raises her eyes to him then, dark and glistening in the puddled lights of the car park - the rain has started. "I'm sorry," she says finally. "Not for what I did, because it still feels the right choice. Remember the first thing you taught me? Never to hush what I felt was offside? But now, I know it was - not good. Right, but not good. And if, if I - if I hadn't -"  
  
'Sally,' he tries again, stiffly aware that it should be Sherlock, not he, groping for the words that absolve. Not that Sherlock Holmes would be bothered with anything so trivial as absolution. Trust the bastard to deputize Lestrade from the grave. Lestrade takes in a damp breath.  
  
'Sally, lass. Surely they told you, Gregson and his pack? I've kept the hat. His hat. Would you - would you like to come up and see it?'  
  
And that's all he needs to say. She bends her head deeper, lower, all the way to the crook of his arm, and as he listens to the first soft whimper rising from her throat, he lets the March rain envelop them both, ready to wait out the fall.

* * *

  
When the end comes, it comes, almost proverbially, with a whisper and a bang.  
  
Lestrade is in his office, tying a few extra rosettes in Gregson's red tape and wondering, not for the first time, if anyone has ever reminded the higher-ups that the letter killeth. Probably not, or they wouldn’t expect their officers to go on taking down statements  _after_  making an arrest. But this is a riddle that not even Sherlock could crack in his bravura days, and Greg grunts in relief when his phone beeps. If he is very, very lucky, Tob needs another crash course on the Care and Feeding of Your Budget Director and Greg will treat his deltoids to a well-earned break.   
  
The voice is deep-toned, stern and to the point. The voice is a loved voice, a long-lost voice and a voice that, up to the last three years, used to quicken every pore in Greg Lestrade’s body to a prickle of expectancy.   
  
On the downside, the voice makes no sense at all.   
  
'Greg. When I tell you to duck, duck.'  
  
A man's soul and a man's mechanical response to the unexpected are often closer than we give them credit for. Two years ago, it would have been Greg's wrath, the red burn of it up to his face, answering the sick fuck on the active end of the joke. Give it another twelve months and he'd have forced himself to speak first, breath stuttering, shocked into a curse, before he even began to process the other's words. 

  
But the truth is that lately, Greg has been selfish, selfish; watching his colleagues raise the dead man’s name everywhere in his quarters, from the Yard’s bogs to the Yard’s Intranet (heading the senior officers’ petition - the pick of them, too - to have the inquest reopened) until they were well and truly haunted. As if they were all grooming Lestrade for this hour, dangling a beloved ghost under his eyes until he could be claimed, tangible and cherished, and redeemed, and what better ghost than a voice on a phone, still bodiless for all its sharp-soft tones.   
  
Or it could be that Lestrade’s heart, another stubborn git, was only waiting for this hour.  
  
Or - but Sherlock’s voice says  _Now_  , and fifteen years of football practice kick in at the word. In his dive down, Lestrade barely hears the whizz of air. But the sound of impact he can’t miss even as it misses him. When he dares to look up again, the hat is no longer balancing on the stay and there is a bullet lodged in the window pane, stuck inside a few rings of cracked glass like a spider in its web.  
  
Out of the common office, the room next to his, comes another crash-and-bang. Lestrade peers through the open door and finds himself staring at the young official whose name always escaped him, perhaps because he is - was - such a clear copy of Dimmock. The lad is sitting before his computer screen with a dot, red and trickling, in the center of his forehead.

Later, Lestrade will think  _Cain_.

Later still, he will be told that the news bulletin on the screen was a fake. A newsflash on one Sebastian Moran’s suicide, in circumstances unplumbed and a Soho bedsitter.   
  
'The odds,' the voice says (making even less sense), 'were fifty-fifty. He could attempt to kill you or he could kill himself, and he was gracious enough to prove me right on both counts. Lestrade, I swear you are going to faint.'  
  
In the nine years of their acquaintance, Lestrade has only once questioned Sherlock’s word. As he keels forward into a graceless heap, he thinks he won’t be charged with a second offence.

* * *

  
Later on, when the force of circumstance has pulled him out of limbo, a vertical DI again, Lestrade finds another risen man in his office.   
  
He waits until the door has shut them in with the gentlest of clicks. Then waits some more.  
  
'You _would_ keep the hat,' Sherlock says at last, and Lestrade chokes in painful thanksgiving, bridging the last gap between them.  
  
The hat, somehow, has made it to the top of the paperwork. From which elevated position it is peering at Sherlock rather cockily, both earflaps at attention. Sherlock watches at the hat, and Lestrade watches Sherlock watching the hat.   
  
"Did you —" he starts, and god, look at him, now he's turned crap at interrogating. What he needs to ask goes without saying, all the _why_ s and _how_ s that keep his trade alive and going, but what he needs to know is, Did you, did you feel any of it, what you put us through? The raw, racking, grovelling, the killing  _hurt,_ did you share it at all? But Lestrade, with a hesitant chuckle, puts up a hand and finds that his cheeks are running wet.  
  
"T-t-," he croaks instead, squashing the tears out with the heel of his hand, and never mind that Sherlock is watching him now, his face crimpled and vulnerable as it hasn’t been for a long time. 'Took you long enough,  _mon gosse_.'  
  
Sherlock is watching.  
  
'Wanker could have offed me thirty times these months,' Lestrade throws in, quick to cover his tracks.   
  
'Who, Chris Moran? No' Still the quiet tones. Something’s changed there. Where is his galvanic Sherlock? The man who rushed in where SOCOs feared to tread? Why isn’t Sherlock smiling? Why isn’t he hurrying? 'He had to wait until his brother gave the sign, and I —'  
  
The door trembles under a knock, followed by his immediate superior putting his face round it.  If Tob is dismayed at the sight of Lestrade's tear-chafed face, he has the decency to pretend it’s all in a day’s work. Like the cracked window and the deadalive guest.  
  
'Greg, they want your arse in the press room, pronto. Yours too, Holmes. All the usual suspects, plus the foreign correspondents and don’t ask me who rounded them up. But you’d better find yourself a hanky, mate, or the tabloids will have a field day.' He coughs, looks from one man to the other, and closes the door in a velvety and completely untypical fashion.  
  
'— made sure that any sign he got, he did when _I_ was in charge,' Sherlock ends, as if there had been no interruption. 'Tonight was thoroughly monitored, Greg. You never ran a risk'  
  
Greg opens his mouth to differ, but Sherlock cuts him short.

'I killed Sebastian Moran myself six weeks after my death. The rest was damage control, as they say; I’ll spare you a tedious count, or account. I killed him first, and he was the first I killed. So. Do you still want me to join you in the press room, Greg?'  
  
He's picked up the hat, scowling at it intently the way he used to, Greg recalls from John’s half-rushed, half-gritted tales, the stories that saw them both through the first endless nights after the Fall. The hat. A mad cap, Greg thinks. Facing forward, facing backward, whichever way you put it, and isn't there a moral in that. He wishes he could share it with Sherlock, but he's never been one for parables and stuff, couldn't see through a glass darkly unless it was made in Ray-Ban, and so he pushes symbolism aside and goes for the point.  
  
'He’d have killed you any other way? '  
  
Lestrade waits until he has the clear, dangerous eyes in his line of sight and Sherlock has nodded his yes.   
  
'We're good, then. Now put on your hat and let’s go feed the lions.'  
  
'But —' The lean face creases into a frown as Sherlock tries to scan him.   
  
_Oh, for God’s sake_ , Greg thinks, and enfolds the killer into a hug, face and all - six feet two of warm, obstinate mortality tucked into the tight clasp of his arms. As if what’s good enough for John Watson wasn't good enough for you, you daft snob. Don’t you make me tell you about right and good, and the workings of a man’s heart, Sherlock Holmes, because _two hundred and forty-three_ don’t even begin to cover them, not half, and the press are waiting. Later, maybe, if you find the time, if I find the guts, I’ll grab a biro and draw you that line again, but right now wrong can bugger right and I wouldn’t lift a finger to part them, not if the result is you here, you close, choking the bleeding ghost out of me –  _God_ , _that ghost!_ – as well you should, you fucking, fucking wonder.  
  
He prises them loose in the end, before he bends to pick the hat from the floor.

'Put it on, Sherlock. C’mon, lad, I'm sure Sally is already sporting hers. And Dimmock, and the whole gang. You know what they say about getting ahead...'  
  
But Sherlock smiles – his old smile, tipped up on one side to warn all and sundry that its owner is enjoying some private joke.  'You do it,' he says. And now the smile is angling up to his eyes, not quite making it, because there’s something else in here that Greg has no idea how to read. Even less when Sherlock, his Sherlock, suddenly drops gracefully before him, one bony knee to the ground.

  
Oh, come on now, he’s not that short a friend? But Sherlock’s hands are warm over his as Lestrade sets the hat once again on the dark curls, and it’s not as if explanations couldn’t wait one more hour.  
  
FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> Rereading this, the Moran plotbunny comes across as a bit wobbly. What I had in mind, I think, was Sherlock killing Sebastian Moran early on in his posthumous adventures, then keeping Moran's death a secret until he could spring it on his brother Chris, Lestrade's hired assassin, forcing him to make a move. The Hiatus here is much shorter than three years.
> 
> ...Yeah. Mostly an excuse to amp the angst a bit!


End file.
